Stephen Downing, a Los Angeles Police Department officer who moonlighted as a writer of police dramas on television and later, as a TV producer, shaped one of the most distinctive aspects of the title action hero of “MacGyver,” the fact that he never carries a gun, died on Nov. 20 in Long Beach, Calif. He was 87.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by sepsis, said his son, Michael, a retired deputy chief of the L.A.P.D.
Mr. Downing was the assistant watch commander at the 77th Division in South Los Angeles when the actor and producer Jack Webb, best known for playing the unflappable detective Joe Friday in the 1950s police series “Dragnet,” called the precinct. Mr. Downing answered the phone and listened to Mr. Webb ask for a technical adviser for “Adam-12,” a new show he was planning for NBC in 1968 and starring Martin Milner and Kent McCord as L.A.P.D. officers.
Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”
He proved a fast and prodigious writer and, for the next dozen years, contributed scripts under pen names (as his bosses requested) while being promoted within the police department.
As Michael Donovan, he wrote 21 episodes of “Adam-12,” 11 of a “Dragnet” reboot in the late 1960s that starred Mr. Webb and Harry Morgan, and 13 of “Emergency!,” a show Mr. Webb produced in the 1970s about Los Angeles paramedics. Under the name Sean Baine, Mr. Downing’s writing credits included “Police Woman,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Kojak” and “Police Story.”
Mr. Downing told The Los Angeles Times in 1984 that some of his bosses were envious of his television work. “People resent it if you make two bucks more than the next guy,” he said. “I initially encountered a lot of jealousy in the department.”
After retiring from the L.A.P.D. in 1980, he produced and wrote, under his own name, action series like “T.J. Hooker,” a police procedural set in Los Angeles that ran on ABC and then CBS from 1982 to 1986 and starred William Shatner, and for ABC’s “MacGyver,” with Richard Dean Anderson as an agent whose only weapon is a Swiss Army knife.
Mr. Downing was hired as the supervising producer of “MacGyver” in 1985 after the pilot episode in which the character carried a gun.
“It was my suggestion that we should demonstrate to our audience that a guy like MacGyver should have the moral constitution against carrying a gun and the smarts to avoid its use — which also made for many interesting ways to get around it,” he said in a 2015 interview with the MacGyver Project blog.
One of those moments came in a fifth-season episode when, Mr. Downing said, MacGyver “picked up a revolver, knocked the cylinder out and used the frame as a wrench to close a valve to save the day from a massive explosion.”
Mr. Downing became the program’s executive producer in its third season and ran the series for the rest of its seven-year run.
Stephen Michael Downing was born on Oct. 28, 1938, in Hanford, in the Central Valley of California. His father, Verlon, was a farmer who later owned a restaurant, and his mother, Virginia (Villiborghi) Downing, kept the home and helped run the restaurant.
As a teenager, Steve worked as a forest ranger and assisted a surveyor in building the runways at Naval Air Station Lemoore. At 18, he married Adrienne Allen, who survives him along with their son; two daughters, Tambree Justice and Julie Davies; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Mr. Downing joined the L.A.P.D. in 1960, less as a career he was passionate about than as a way to support his family. Creative writing served as a hedge against a short law-enforcement career, but he “got bit by the police bug and stuck with it,” Michael Downing said.
He was a patrolman deployed to the Watts area of Los Angeles during the riots in 1965. He was promoted to sergeant in 1966, lieutenant in 1969 and captain in 1972. He served as the commanding officer of the juvenile division and the special investigations unit, and, in 1979, was elevated to deputy chief.
His other television credits after leaving the L.A.P.D. included producing series like Knight Rider,” about a crime fighter played by David Hasselhoff with a customized, talking Pontiac Trans Am named KITT; writing and producing “Without Warning: Terror in the Towers,” a 1993 NBC movie about the bombing of the World Trade Center that year; and working as the executive producer of short-lived TV adaptations of the films “RoboCop” and “F/X.”
Over the last decade or so, Mr. Downing wrote about law enforcement in Beachcomber, a Long Beach newspaper, and on the Substack online platform. He also spoke out against the yearslong war on drugs, which he said had been a failure, for an organization called the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which began as a cannabis advocacy group and later broadened to criminal justice and drug policy reform.
“Steve had this abiding sense of doing justice and of understanding that the proper role of policing is not mindlessly hurting people through the criminal justice system,” Diane Goldstein, a former police lieutenant and the executive director of L.E.A.P., said in an interview. “He felt justice needs to be fair and equitable, and not based on who you know or how much money you have.”
In 2018, he uncovered, with help from news partner Al Jazeera and the American Civil Liberties Union, a scandal involving officers of the Long Beach Police Department who used Tiger Text, an app that deleted messages from their phones after a few days, shielding potentially sensitive and incriminating information from forensic scrutiny. The department stopped using the app shortly after the first story was published.
Mr. Downing had cultivated sources within the police department who trusted him as a former high-level officer in Los Angeles, according to CheckLBPD, a blog that monitors misconduct and mismanagement at the Long Beach Police Department.
More recently, in a Substack column in October, he criticized President Donald Trump’s use of military strikes against suspected drug couriers in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. (More than 20 vessels have been targeted since Sept. 2, and at least 87 people have been killed.)
In his column, Mr. Downing recalled a drug seizure off the coast of California in the 1970s in which the L.A.P.D. coordinated with the U.S. Coast Guard. A search warrant, he noted, was obtained to install a secret tracking device on the boat.
“Nobody died,” he wrote. “Nobody needed to. The evidence was solid, the warrants clean and the courts handled the rest.”
Now, though, he added: “The doctrine being written at sea today will be the justification for domestic violence tomorrow. Once a president learns he can kill without due process abroad, the temptation to do it on U.S. soil follows close behind.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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